At each of these junctures, conservatives were ridiculed for their fool's errands and fretted over their lost causes. When former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers famously migrated from left to right, he said, "I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under communism."

But Chambers was wrong. He joined the winning side, the side with the better arguments. The other naysayers were wrong too. Some of the New Deal survived, but many of FDR's statist ambitions were quashed. National Review didn't stop history, but it certainly changed it. The Federalist Society now claims Supreme Court justices as alumni. Nixonian liberalism is gone from the GOP. Fox News crushes its competitors. The tea parties fueled one of the biggest midterm landslides in a generation.